DetroitAC's Load Tester Block
Jinu117 wrote an excellent guide to an easy load tester, I don't want to hijack his thread, but thought I should share mine.
The idea here is to make a loadtester that has the same distribution of heat flux as an operating CPU. So the block that conducts the heat is the size of a CPU chip, an IHS is used to properly spread the heat out before the evap. This will be used for an evap calorimeter that I'm building for use in developing my evap designs, and testing other evaps (I have a Kayl that I'll be using as a benchmark, It "looks" like one of the best designs to me).
This was made in a CNC milling machine, although it was so simple, I don't think CNC functions were ever used, so it was essentially a manual milling machine. I had the same logic as Jinu117, all of the heat from the cartridge heater will flow to the evaporator if that's the only path. That being the case, I decided to use aluminum (cheaper and easier) and a long path to allow the heat flux to spread out evenly over the cpu chip sized column. I haven't finished the apparatus yet, this is only the heater, block, and an AMD IHS to simulate that effect.
I bought an Athlon CPU off ebay that had broken pins for cheap, and I machined off everything but the IHS to get it to use for this loadtester.
I'll be using a variac, but with a clamp current meter for AC amps, same multimeter for AC Volts. The cartridge heater is a 300W @120V size, allows plenty of room to hit most heatloads. I've worked with some test apparatus that are sized for exactly the conditions, and because of minor variations they cannot always achieve them. For instance if I used 200W @ 120V cartridge, and my house only has 115V I can achieve 192W :nono:
Next steps are to build a baseplate that will allow me to just clamp evap, IHS, block together. Then build an insulating box to surround everything.
